[Continued]
Solidarity is a beautiful thing. I’d been planning to visit the main sites of the Venice Biennale at the Giardini and the Arsenale, admission €30.00 full price. But I was staying at the other end of Venice and there was a sciopero that day: the vaporetto, the water bus, was on strike, perhaps to protest the high cost of museum-going. So I started at the edge.
Edge: from a discursive point of view more than a topographical one.
The Biennale works like a kind of wheel. The hub consists of approved and sponsored exhibitions: artists promoted by their home countries as a form of cultural propaganda. Close by geographically and ideologically, are the works chosen by the designated curator for the Biennale according to some theme or other, a fluid ideological collusion with the various national pavilions, the posture of a counterweight to commodification.
Spreading out beyond the hub: exhibitions sponsored by billionaires and corporations and well-heeled galleries. The point is to make those seem as visible, if not more visible, than the Biennale itself. If the exchange-value of the work on display is thought to be dependent on its visibility, then the work’s closeness to the hub is thought to determine its exchange-value. A showplace on the Grand Canal helps, or ads plastered over the vaporetti if they’re running. Better yet, the People’s Republic of Upscale Consumption:
Bulgari has its own pavilion among the nations, with rhetoric to match:
Beyond all that lies the murky world of artists and such, those who have an interest in art but are marginally invested, if at all, in the process of valorisation activated in radiating circles by the Biennale itself: artists who may work in Venice or visit Venice or show in Venice; street artists, graphic artists and graffiti artists in considerable numbers; self-described art-workers and activists; and those independent actors whose economic isolation empowers them to make political statements and demonstrations, and little else.
And critics. I was stuck upriver from the action. The story of my life.
To be continued.
WOID XXV-27b
May 31, 2026